Why Artists Are Doing It In The Road: Special Report

They are hardly the ideal conditions in which to create. Danger is a constant menace, and it comes in multiple guises. Industrial injury is the main threat, as is the risk of arrest. Other hazards include deafness, breathing polluted air and the looming shadow of public discontent. The tools and materials used in this form of installation - power drill, tarmac and steamroller - are expensive. And the work cannot be sold. But despite these powerful deterrents, there are clandestine groups of vagabond practitioners who will stop at nothing to get their work into the public sphere. You may not know you know it, but you’ve certainly seen it. They call it, quite simply, road art.

Forget Banksy. Forget the trapeze performers of Cirque de Soleil. Forget all other forms of self-expression which require practitioners to put themselves on the line. Road artists operate at the outer extremes of artistic daredevilry. And yet it’s a trick of their work that, while their creations are ubiquitous, they themselves are invisible. Next time you find yourself stuck in a traffic jam, the chances are that road artists will be at large in the vicinity. Their telltale sign is a triangular semaphore with a red trim depicting a man bent over a shovel in black silhouette on a white background. If you pass one of those (pictured below), you are entering a creative space.

Because of the paraphernalia of road art, the huge array of equipment required to install the work - red-and-white barriers, traffic-directing signs, heavy-goods vehicles, a massive pneumatic drill – the work actually produced by road artists is itself very rarely appreciated. So what is road art? At its most basic it consists of a series of interruptions of the smooth surface of the public highway. These can take many forms. The simplest manifestation of entry-level road art is a strip of coal-black tarmac running along some faded grey tarmac for an unspecified length. This is known as a “lesion” – road art is fond of vocabulary that evokes surgical incision. Often it may have short tangents bearing off from the main thrust of the line, or “stumps”. (Paraphernalia required to install a small lesion, pictured below: the road artists refused to be photographed.)

But road art is by no means restricted to monochrome. Bus lanes and cycle routes both allow the road artist to vary his palette (and it invariably is his, not hers: for specific reasons - of which more later - road artists are always male). Often laid out by local councils in attractive designs of, say, red or green, dedicated bus routes and cycle lanes afford the road artist almost unlimited opportunities to come in and mix colours. Usually these are next to the kerb, enabling creative interplay with - and random overlay of - double yellow lines and white street markings.

But it shouldn’t be supposed that road art is created only in two dimensions. The most sophisticated road artists are nothing if not eager to explore variegations in texture and form. The more advanced examples introduce corrugations and undulations into the working surface, sometimes even quite unsubtly, in the form of potholes, manholes and other miscellaneous holes. It’s widely accepted that the full scope of a road artist’s skill is best understood by cyclists. They are closer to the ground, and tend to keep their eyes on the road, and additionally can appreciate these three-dimensional explorations of shape and design through the medium of the bike seat.

Indeed, one of the most spectacular examples of road art was only yesterday shot from the seat of a bicycle. The cameraman was a reporter from theartsdesk who, required to go undercover to bring in this story, has taken the pseudonym of FaceBike. In the video below, note the road artist's careful management of contour, the riotous fusion of colour and expert interleaving of ruction and rut. Experts have variously seen elements of Cubism, Dadaism, Post-Modernism and über-anarchism. The smooth surface of the road has been imaginatively but above all comprehensively mashed up.

Watch FaceBike's exclusive video

So that, in a nutshell, is what road art is. But what’s it saying? Who actually does it? And, when all’s said and done, why? It’s a quirk of this particular form of art that art critics and connoisseurs are never invited to cast judgement on the work. There are no openings, no galleries, no dealers nor auction houses. There aren’t even any coffee table books: their work is very rarely photographed. There is literally nothing in it for road artists. Indeed, it actually costs them money to create their work. There has been talk of installing a classic example of road art along the length of the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, but negotiations with the road artists broke down when health and safety officials decreed the road art too dangerous for the public to walk on. Apparently they might sprain an ankle. And it gets worse. A group of road artists from Birmingham who this year applied for an Arts Council grant were required to reveal a company address. Four men were this week charged with vandalism, theft and driving an HGV without a licence.

Unfunded, unexhibited, unvalued, road art looks certain to remain the most underground art form in the history of art. Albeit it’s overground.

FaceBike, tipped off via a source by means of a contact who was himself operating through an intermediary, managed to meet up with some road artists as they went out at dead of night. Names, needless to say, were not exchanged. Nor were handshakes nor even nods or winks. Even if they had agreed to let their faces be described, it would be a daunting task to distinguish them. The road artists insisted on meeting at dead of night while wearing helmets and earphones. As the noise was so loud it proved impossible for theartsdesk’s reporter to extract much information from them. It goes without saying that the conversation was not recorded. But the following facts about the mysterious art form emerged.

Road artists operate in groups of no fewer than four. Their roles are parcelled out according to a strict hierarchy that in the road art “scene” has rapidly become ritualised:

1. one to put up the counterfeit roadsigns
2. one to operate the heavy machinery – the digger and/or steamroller
3. one to fill in the pigmented tarmac
4. one to stand around smoking a fag looking supernumerary

“If you don’t look like the real thing,” one of them shouts over the roar of a drill, “you’ll get rumbled in no time. We could do our work more quickly, get in and out, but it would be a dead giveaway. Might as well wear a sign saying ‘IMPOSTOR: PLEASE ARREST’. So we have to wear the gear and go slow.” It’s for this reason that women are not commonly found working as road artists. They would be too conspicuous.

In order to blend in, road art “crews”, as they are known, not only have to don the appropriate industrial livery: overalls, donkey jackets, helmets etc. They must also wear luminous bibs bearing the logo and name of, typically, a cable company or a gas multinational or some other public utility supplier. Popular names in London for road art crews are British Water, Thames Gas and Piscali.

It turns out that these are in fact aliases which allow road artists to go about their work unimpeded. Each “crew” is known in the road art community by a secret handle or “tag” which, according to another tradition, must include the word “road”. One of the most active London crews is known as One For the Road. There is a pair of Liverpool crews known as The Long and Winding Road and Why Don’t We Do it in the Road. A vicious sectarian turf war recently broke out in Glasgow between a crew of Catholics called You’ll Take the High Road and their deadly Protestant enemies And I’ll Take the Low Road.

But sometimes road artists simply take their name from the road where they made their first incision on the urban roadscape. Last night theartsdesk went out on the road in west London with a crew known, for self-evident reasons, as Goldhawk Road. FaceBike had been asked along to witness a particularly daring operation in which the Goldhawk Road crew were planning to lay a pristine coat of black tarmac overnight and then come back the next morning - ie this morning - and immediately daub it in a rainbow array of yellow lines, bus lane markings overlaid with red-strip lesions and green stumps. If they manage to pull it off it will set a new world record for the swiftest violation of a freshly laid road.

The reporter was only allowed to witness the overnight operation. He was advised that to come back and watch the installation of the actual road art this morning “would only arouse suspicions”. This grainy picture (above right) gives some indication of the conditions under which the Goldhawk Road crew worked last night. Owing to the extreme peril of being caught, for the first time they were wearing the outfits of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, sourced from a mole in the council works department, along with a huge lorryful of tarmac.

As the team worked, the reporter managed to put a few questions to the fourth crew member whose job it was to stand about looking supernumerary. Road artists, he explained between puffs on a cigarette, have sprung up all over the world. There’s a highly mobile American crew known simply as On the Road who specialise in creating rural happenings in the middle of nowhere (pictured below, snatched image of a member of the On the Road crew).

“But there are some territories road artists found difficult to crack.”

“Such as?”

“Switzerland.”

“Why’s that?”

“Can’t find any Swiss who believe in cutting a clean road surface. Same with Singapore. Sweden. Basically, boring places. Other countries we can’t get into for the opposite reason. Iraq, Moldova, Republic of Ireland.”

“What’s the problem there?”

“Simple. Any intervention a road artist makes will be an improvement. Kind of kills the fun when the road artists wrecking the highway are state-funded and operate officially out of local councils.”

In front of us a dump truck levers its carriage to a steep angle and two tonnes of tarmac start to slump onto the Goldhawk Road (pictured right). The Goldhawk Road crew get to work spreading it. It’s a laborious process. They are laying no more than 50 metres overnight but it takes several hours. To the untrained eye it is immensely tedious to watch. But those who know what they’re looking for can tell that these are skilled technicians at work. The road artists take especial care to reproduce the gentle curve of the original camber.

"We want as smooth a surface as possible to work with," explains the fourth member of the crew, stumping out another cigarette on the traffic island where he's taken up a position.

The crew are extremely vulnerable as they concentrate on the finicky business of steamroller control. At one point a police vehicle drives by on patrol in the one lane the road artists have left open for traffic. It’s a moment of high tension as the squad car decelerates. Through long experience the crew know best how to deal with the situation. They all stop and raise an arm in acknowledgement. A passenger window slides open and a uniformed arm waves back.

“Aw’ight, lads?”

The Goldhawk Road crew smile and nod and return to their work.

By the end of the night the tarmac has been laid. They’ve used a special quick-drying variety allowing them to come back and complete the work this morning without drawing attention to themselves. Work will resume some time before midday. As they pack up tools and prepared to leap into their fleet of council vehicles, the reporter managed to squeeze in one last question.

“You can’t sell it. You can’t sign it. Nobody knows it’s your work. Why do you do it?”

Surprisingly, the answer comes from the supernumerary one who doesn’t actually lift a finger - he seems to be the leader of the Goldhawk Road crew. His reply amounts to a manifesto for the road art movement.

“It’s the fundamental role of the artist to portray the world as it is,” he says, “and that means nothing less than the celebration of disorder and the mimetic recreation of chaos. Cities are very untidy places. The aim of every road artist is to keep it that way. The problem is that you can paint over paint. You can uninstall installations. Road artists like their work to be a bit more indelible. That’s why they do it in the road. Come back in the morning,” he says, “and you’ll see.”